PoolParty Multi-Tier Environments

A single production environment with one production license (1 tier) includes all stages of the data lifecycle.

A clear advantage of a single tier solution is that you only need to manage and maintain a single server and can be a cost-effective solution for essentially non-demanding tasks.

This approach however bears significant risks - it is a single point of failure as all activities are performed on the same server, furthermore the risk of instability and downtimes is quite high, not to mention performance impairments due to using a single server for both creation and serving of requests.

This solution includes two licenses - one production and one non-production (2 tier solution).

The argument speaking for this approach is the separation of development and testing from any productive publishing activities on an upstream system.

The disadvantage of this deployment model is however that the productive environment continues to be shared between authoring and publishing and cannot remain read-only, moreover there is potential for conflicts when the productive environment is also used as an upstream system for integrations.

This solution includes two production licenses - one for publishing and upstream system and the other for authoring and staging, data integration and service orchestration.

This approach offers the advantage of having a dedicated productive environment for publishing or as an upstream system; the production environment is usually read-only offering higher stability. Furthermore changes can be reviewed and promoted to the productive environment in line with the governance guidelines.

This solution does however also bear a few potential disadvantages - one of them is the shared usage of the authoring environment for other non-productive activities, and the other being potential resource conflicts between authoring and integration respectively testing tasks.

This solution provides you with three licenses - two production and one non-production. The non-production license is used for development, testing and acceptance tasks. The first production license is dedicated for publishing and any upstream system, whereas the second production license is meant for authoring and staging activities, data integration and service orchestration.

The advantages of this deployment scenario are clear - a dedicated productive environment for publishing , or as an upstream system, and higher system stability since the productive environment is usually read-only. In addition, a dedicated environment for authoring/staging is separated from non-productive tasks involving integration, development and testing.

This approach offers clear separation of concerns; but depending on the priority and requirements of authoring/staging bears the potential disadvantage of shared usage and resource conflicts.

This multi-tier solution includes two or more production licenses for dedicated publishing, upstream system, redundancy and load balancing. Another separate production license is intended for authoring and staging, data integration and service orchestration, and finally one non-production license is specifically meant for performing any development, testing and acceptance activities.

The arguments speaking for this deployment model are - use of dedicated productive environment for publishing or an upstream system with read-only access resulting in higher stability. A dedicated environment for authoring/staging is separated from non-productive tasks involving integration development and testing. This scalable approach can also be deployed as a failover solution for productive environments, resulting in performance and availability increases.

This approach offers clear separation of concerns; but depending on the priority and requirements of authoring/staging bears the potential disadvantage of shared usage and resource conflicts. Moreover it increases the complexity of the solution, potentially leading to additional maintenance.